


Lena Luthor: Reshaping a Legacy

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, mostly about lena, not so much about the romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 01:39:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13671588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Another fake CATCO magazine article nspired by the wonderful work of tumblr artist foleypdx:https://foleypdx.tumblr.com/post/169948364022/lena-luthor-catco-magazine-cover-another-print





	Lena Luthor: Reshaping a Legacy

The name Luthor leaves footprints all over the corridors of power across the country, but nowhere moreso than in National City, where the family first established itself and made much of its fortune.  Senators whisper it in frustration, judges mutter it in disgust, prison wardens spit it with disdain, criminals with a degree of awe.

Lena Luthor wants you to know, she wants no part of it.

We’ve met at an open-air café in the downtown Market District, not far from Luthor’s notoriously chic loft on the waterfront.  She’s friendly and direct, poised and confident.  A far cry from the guarded black sheep I was expecting.  She’s dressed down and ordered a Niçoise salad and some sparkling water, and she fiddles a lot with her ponytail, which keeps coming loose. 

The first thing she seems eager to get out of the way is that she is Not Like Other Luthors.  Indeed, she’s careful to pay respects to her brother’s brilliance and her parents’ insistence on teaching her a thousand and one things that she would need to know to survive in a world where her name would be as much a curse as the fortune that came with it would be a blessing.  She talks about coding classes, science camp, but also Survival Scouts and marksmanship lessons –yes, that’s right, she can fire both a gun and a bow and arrow and is apparently quite accurate with both– and literature and fencing and finance and chess.  She waves dismissively when I use the word genius to refer to her.  She says she was just educated very, very well.

Then, once she’s done with that, she gets to the heart of the matter, which is that she is here to remake the Luthor brand.  No more of Lionel Luthor’s vulture capitalism, she says, and no more of Lex Luthor’s chemical weapons development, and no more of Lillian Luthor’s biowarfare.  One of her first moves, in fact, on taking the helm of LuthorCorp was to change the name to L Corp.  The second was to shut down any departments related to weapons technology or biological warfare, either shuttering them entirely or repurposing them for non-combat purposes.  Her family’s fortune, she makes it quite clear, is not going to be used to threaten people anymore, human or non-human.

Now she’s focused on curing diseases.  Making light-years-ahead advances in medical technology, gene therapy, and products designed to combat famine, disease and so forth.  Several municipalities have been clamoring for her to develop tech for law enforcement, but in this regard, she’s hesitant.

“I think there’s too much abuse of power by law enforcement in this country at the moment,” she says frankly. “I don’t need to give them tools to make shooting unarmed minorities in the back easier.”

So, I ask, is she anti-cop?  I know it’s a loaded and probably grossly oversimplifying question.

She simply laughs.  “I’m anti- murder in which nobody is held accountable.  Of course you need police forces.  I’m just concerned that maybe we need someone to police the police.”

She moves on, brisk and bright and ever friendly.  Her smile is disarming as she talks about the other changes at L Corp: she flushed out a lot of the old guard that was involved in her brother’s more dubious work, and has brought in a number of young rock stars whose CV’s brim with promise: Samantha Arias, the new CFO, and Alex Danvers, the new head of bioengineering R&D are two new additions to the firm that she’s very excited about.  She talks about wanting to stock the place with good people who are not just talented but are made of the same moral stuff as herself, and are excited about creating things that will help the world.

And what, I ask, about her planned acquisition of CatCo?  Isn’t it a conflict of interest?

She shakes her head.  “No, not at all.  I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the media is a bit of trouble these days. It’s competing for eyeballs, and struggling to retain credibility.  It’s under attack, if you want my honest opinion.  Some of the parties that have their eye on CatCo are not people that I want to see messing with the quality of one of the better commercial media empires in the country.”

So she’s trying to do nothing less than save the Fourth Estate?

“Exactly.”  And she so passionate, it’s hard not to believe her.

Further discussion of her family is politely but firmly cut off.  She doesn’t like to talk in particular about her mother and brother, but is clear that she wishes they had made different choices in their lives.  So instead, we talk about romance and she crunches on the hard end of the bread while she considers the answer to the question, “So do you imagine Supergirl is the end of the line for you?”

“I hope so,” she says with a faint smile that feels more girlish than any other I’ve seen today.  “We’re both living in the moment for now.  But yes, I hope so.”  It’s a rare moment in which she’s knocked off of her poise a little, and her cheeks take on a little color.

One wonders how they find time to date: the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a superhero constantly being called to the crisis of the moment must be rather stretched on time.  Luthor is circumspect, and doesn’t want to talk specifics.  “When you’re really into someone, you make time.  You steal it from somewhere else if you have to.”

And then relentlessly, she is back on message.  “I think she recognizes that what we’re trying to do is positive, and important, and I think that there’s a mutual respect there.”

I comment on the skillful pivot and she smiles.  She’s had media training, I remark, and she confesses that yes, it was in the long list of things her parents did when she was just in her teens.  We talk a little bit about teenage Lena Luthor.  “You’d barely recognize me.”  She shows me her Facebook page, rifling through Throwback Thursday pictures of her and her friends in torn jeans and heavy black eyeliner.  “I was a rebel,” she says, laughing modestly.  “My parents hated that phase with a passion.”

But it’s hard to miss the fact that she still is.  The goth teenager in the pictures was attending environmentalist rallies and protests against abortion restrictions.  The Lena Luthor of today isn’t often seen marching with a sign in hand anymore, and she might be a little more fashion-conscious, but she is bucking the grain of her entire life by taking L Corp in a direction that would have surprised anyone with preconceived notions about what the name Luthor means.  She is quite literally beating a multibillion-dollar sword into a plowshares.  And she seems quite pleased with herself about it.

“There is nowhere I’d rather be than in National City, and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than turning the Luthor fortunes into a force for good.”

Even with the city’s lingering distrust?

“Yeah, even with that.  At some point, you judge a person by their works and deeds, right?  I want to leave a different legacy.  I want to leave a legacy that makes someone like Supergirl proud to know me.  I want to leave a legacy that will have the Luthor name on plaques all over the place not because people are afraid of it or because it was bought in exchange for influence.  I want it to be because people remember this family as having given something to the world.”

So it’s just for the plaques, I ask her.

Her eyes twinkle a little.  “Good try, but no.”

And then she ends the interview with a question for me.  “I do it because it’s right.  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to change what my name means to people.  If your family was known for being Nazis who stole gold from Jews in World War II, what would you do with that gold?”


End file.
